Zizek's Rhetorical Matrix: The SymptomaticEnjoyment of Postmodern Academic Writing

Robert Samuels

In "On the Rhetoric of Theory in the Discipline of Writing: A Commentand a Proposal, " Lynn Worsham asks us to examine the role of postmoderntheory in the field of composition. Two of her main concerns are the partplayed by theory in the construction of writing as a discipline, and the useof theory in constructing a professional identity for composition scholarsand practitioners. Worsham posits that the field of composition's recentinterest in postmodern theory, as it relates to social and political change,may represent an effort to transform the field of writing into an importantintellectual component of the contemporary university and thus enablecomposition to escape from its debased status as a purely service-orienteddiscipline (389, 390). I want to respond to Worsham's call to examine themultiple roles of theory in the discipline of composition by analyzing therhetoric of Slavoj Zizek's recent work. More importantly, I will argue inthis essay that Zizek's writings show us why the tum to theory couldactually hurt the field of composition by increasing our discipline's levelof ideological misrecognition concerning the economics and politics ofhigher education. On the one hand, I will posit that the future ofcomposition studies depends on our ability to confront the concreteeconomic realities that place composition in a low position on theuniversity totem pole. On the other hand, Iwill affirm that theory has oftenbeen used to hide these economic realities, and, yet, theory can also helpif it is directed toward fundamental economic and political transforma­tions in higher education.

In the case of Zizek' s work, we find an academic theorist who hasactively engaged in the economics and politics of postmodern culture;however, he has rarely if ever directly discussed the fundamental antago­nisms shaping higher education. 1 I believe that his lack of analysis

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concerning the politics and economics shaping the vast majority of hisreadership is symptomatic of contemporary academic discourse, for it ismy contention that Zitek and many other academic critics employabstract and universalizing political theories in order to escape thehorrible working and thinking conditions shaping academic labor. Thus,instead of discussing the exploitation of part-time instructors, the infla­tion of class size, the de facto loss of tenure, the de-funding of highereducation, the rise of a new administrative class, and the use of graduatestudents as surplus labor, political academics often use theory to examinesocial issues such as multiculturalism, globalism, mass culture, and cybercommunities.

What is strange is that Zitek himself often points to this problematicuse of theory when he discusses postmodem criticism and liberalmulticulturalism. For example, in "Repeating Lenin" he denounces"contemporary academic politics" for its failure to confront the funda­mental economic antagonisms shaping our world:

Letus take two predominant topics oftoday's American radical academia:postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism isundoubtedly crucial; however, "postcolonial studies" tend to translate itinto the multiculturalist problematic of the colonized minorities' "right tonarrate" their victimizing experience, of the power mechanisms whichrepress "otherness," so that, at the end of the day, we learn that the rootof the postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance towards the Other, and,furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our intolerancetowards the "Stranger in Ourselves," in our inability to confront what werepressed in and of ourselves-the politico-economic struggle is thusimperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of thesubject unable to confront its inner traumas .... The true corruption of theAmerican academia is not primarily financial, it is not only that they areable to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included-up toa point), but conceptual: notions of the "European" critical theory areimperceptibly translated into the benign universe of the CulturalStudies chic. (2)

In this wonderfully revealing passage, Zizek presents his argument thatcultural studies and other postmodem discourses work by translatingpolitical and economic struggles into "pseudo-psychoanalytic" dramas.This transformation then allows for critical European theories to betransl ated into the "benign" reaIm 0 f fashionab1e cultural studi es. In otherterms, culture trumps economics in the academic realm of high theory. In

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fact, Zizek hints that he himself has become nothing but a culturalcommodity bought and sold in the American academic market. Yet, evenwith this not-so-repressed self-revelation, Zizek insists that the Americanacademy is not corrupted primarily by financial concerns; rather, heclaims that the corruption comes from the cultural translation of eco­nomic and political factors into cultural theories.

Zizek's failure to understand the economic determination of Ameri­can academic politics is presented out in the open in this same essay,where he shows his ignorance of the economic constraints facing manyradical American academics:

My personal experience is that practically all of the "radical" academicssilently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model,with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (asurprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is athing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the(relatively) safe life environment of the "symbolic classes" in the devel­oped Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct zeal whendealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thusultimately a defense against their own innermost identification, a kind ofcompulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: "Let's talk as much as possibleabout the necessity of a radical change to make it sure that nothing willreally change!"

What Zizek does not know, or refuses to accept, is the material conditionsfacing a large number of his academic readership. The stereotype ofacademics with secure tenured-positions playing the stock market isbecoming more of an ideological fantasy than a social reality in ourcontemporary world of academic downsizing. In reali ty, the prob lem withradical academics is not that they are content with their great financialpositions; rather, the problem is that they have been unable or unwillingto confront the concrete economic and political factors shaping theworking conditions in their own home institutions. Zizek's pronounce­ments on the politics of American academics therefore play into the veryideological fantasies he claims to critique. To counter Zi.zek's fantasmaticrepresentation of American higher education and cultural politics, I wantto offer my view of the role played by theory in the economics of highereducation, and then I will offer a rhetorical reading of Zizek' s workin order to clarify some of the destructive aspects of contemporaryacademic discourse.

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Theory and Downward Mobility in Composition StudiesAfter twenty years ofparticipating in the higher education job market asa graduate student, faculty member, graduate advisor, and administrator,I have come to the conclusion that there is indeed a secret plot shaping therole of theory in the humanities. This politico-economic plot is deter­mined by the desire of universities to cut costs by producing a constantsurplus of overqualified but unemployable graduate students and faculty.One of the potential problems in this system is that it depends on graduatestudents' participating in their own future unemployment. In order tosolve this conflict, universities help to provide the ideological fantasy ofthe tenured research position. Yet, this system has itself threatened to fail,and so a new mechanism is needed to keep the steady production ofsurplus graduate labor flowing. This new strategy involves traininggraduate students in fields that do not hire any permanent faculty. Startingin the 1980s, this trend manifested itself in the production of dissertationsin cultural studies, literary theory, and other critical interdisciplinarydomains. The only problem with these new areas of research is thatvirtually no one is hiring anyone into tenurable positions to specialize incultural studies, literary theory, and interdisciplinary studies. If you donot believe me, just look at the MLA Job Information List for the lasttwenty years. The vast majority of jobs in the humanities are still definedby traditional areas of historical periodization, In fact, the same depart­ments, which are often the hot beds of high theory, tend to hire within verynarrow standard specializations.

One of the results of this process is that graduate students, since theydid not specialize in the right area, accept their unemployment orunderemployment as their own problem. Likewise, individual depart­ments can always say that it is not their fault since there is a lack ofqualified candidates. Of course, the real problem is that there should bemore than enoughjobs for everyone: universities have simply decided toreplace tenured faculty with part-time instructors and graduate students.One of the effects this overreliance on graduate students has had on thefield of composition is to circulate the ideology that anyone can-orwill-teach writing. This in tum has undermined any attempt the field ofcomposition has made at gaining respectability and influence in theuniversity.

Now, if we enter the role of theory into this process, we see that a lotof radical graduate students have transformed their social and politicalenergies into abstract theoretical research interests only to be told that thesystem itself has no need for their area of expertise. In fact, many of the

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graduate students doing theory in the last twenty years have wound uprepackaging themselves as compositionists in a desperate attempt to gainemployment. This economic process has helped to introduce theory intomany writing programs from the bottom up. However, this infiltration oftheory has often encountered the strong force of the service ethic, whichworks to undermine critical thinking in favor of the "practical" need toteach students how to write for their other classes and their futureemployment. Every aspect of the system thus seems to work against therole of theory in the humanities.

This same conflict between postmodern cultural theory and thepolitical and economic realities facing higher education is reflectedthroughout Zizek's work in his discussions of liberal multiculturalism,false individualism, economic globalism, and political fundamentalism.In fact, I believe that these four central aspects of contemporary societyshape the totality of his theory, and they can be effectively employed todiscuss the current dynamics of higher education in the United States. Onthe most basic level, Zizek posits that liberal multiculturalism is a falseform of cultural politics hiding the true power of global capitalism, whichis itself generated out of a matrix of fundamental political antagonismsand hidden by the false ideology of psychological individualism. WhileI do not think that he is wrong in this analysis, I do think that he missesthe essential point by refusing to examine the ro Ie played by Iocal pol iticaland economic factors in shaping the cultural systems he critiques. One ofthe main reasons for his theoretical blindness is that he is locked into amodernist Hegelian conception ofuniversality that threatens to transformhis entire corpus into a self-consuming rhetorical machine.'

Modern Writing and Postmodern TheoryThis mechanical nature of Zizek's rhetorical productions is discussed inhis JA Cinterview with Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, when he declaresthat he does not have "an aesthetic attitude toward writing" and that his"obsession" is to "transmit ideas" like a pure "thinking machine" (253).This very modernist move of defining writing as a pure act of mechanicalreproduction may seem odd to those of us who know Zizek to be a verypostmodem writer whose style is often anything but straightforward andmechanical.' Indeed, it appears absurd that a critic like Zizek, who isconstantly concerned with the problematic nature of language and com­munication, would state that his own composition process is based on"self-instrumentalization" and an attempt to efface his own subjectivityfrom his textual productions (254). Of course, we could read his declara-

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tions as ironic postmodem posturing; however, I want to argue thatZitek's stress on the mechanical nature of his writing represents arepressed awareness of a central tension haunting contemporary aca­demic writing. This tension concerns the conflict between the globaltechnological homogenization of our world and the amazing diversifica­tion of our cultures. In Zizek's own work, this dialectic is played outbetween the globalizing realm offree market high-tech capitalism and theexpression of liberal multicultural lifestyles."

On a fundamental level, Zizek argues that our shared technologiesand economic systems produce a global structure catering to diverseidentities and cultural representations.' However, as Zizek points out inhis JAC interview, he believes that the multicultural realm of identitypolitics "serves to obliterate, to render invisible ... the more fundamentalcapitalist economic struggles" (278). Underlying Zizek's argument hereis the idea that global capitalism produces multiculturalism in order tohide the true functioning of capitalist determinism. Thus, while it appearswe have an incredible mixing of cultures and belief systems in contem­porary global society, there is still a shared economic system (capitalism)determining all relationships.

Zizek's critique of post modern liberal multiculturalism is centeredon his argument that underlying the multicultural tolerance of the Otheris a secret Cartesian subjectivity proclaiming a universal, empty, andneutral status for the democratic subject (280). What then makes globalcapitalism global for Zizek is that it is based on the definition of a subjectas void of all content. In Looking Awry, Zizek makes this point in thefollowing way: "The subj ect of democracy is not a human person, 'man'in all the richness of his needs, interests, and beliefs. The subject ofdemocracy, like the subject of psychoanalysis, is none other than theCartesian subject in all its abstraction, the empty punctuality we reachafter subtracting all its particular contents" (163).

Here we see one of'Zizek's great rhetorical feats: he is able to equatevery different concepts and discourses so that they all seem to be makingthe same argument. In this context, the subject of democracy becomesequivalent to the subject of psychoanalysis and the Cartesian subject. Inall these separate domains, he locates the same definition of the subjectas one void of all content. For example, he argues that in democracy everysubj ect is considered to be equal in front of the law without regard to race,sex, religion, or class (Looking 163). By removing these cultural andbiological attributes from the status of the subject, one effectively erasesthe subject's content in favor ofa universal notion of equality. This same

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"equal but empty subject" is necessary for "value-free" science, whereevery finding is supposed to be repeatable for any other person regardlessof his or her particular beliefs and values. Finally, in capitalism, it isnecessary to establish a universal exchange value that does not changeaccording to who is doing the buying and selling.

Of course, all of these universal realms are impossible fictions, butthey still have worked to shape our culture since the Enlightenment.Moreover, these universal realms of democracy, science, and capitalismdefine what we now call modem culture and the modem subject. Forexample, in the following passage from the Communist Manifesto, we seehow Marx identifies the modem capitalist subject by the subj ect' s abilityto efface all previous belief systems and prejudices:

Uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncer­tainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerableprejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones becomeantiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all thatis holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses,his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Marx's description of the revolutionizing power of capitalism thusdefines the subject as one who is constantly uncertain and changing, and,therefore, this subject is void of any fixed internal or external attributes.Furthermore, since these subjects overcome all prejudices and beliefs,which traditionally block people from encountering the naked reality ofeconomic exploitation, they (the ever-changing bourgeoisie) are sup­posed to enter into direct confrontation with the realities of capitalism.

Of course, we know now that Marx was wrong about his predictionconcerning capitalism's ability to overcome itself by negating deceptivebelief systems and thus providing a clear understanding of its ownexploitative nature. According to Zizek, the two central things that Marxgot wrong were that he did not see the power of psychological deception,and he did not understand the role played by Hegelian negativity. On thelevel of psychological deception, Zizek highlights the way that capitalismconstantly produces new modes of self-deception by playing on thesubject's desire to be a free individual:

This is how ideology functions today, how the very new unfreedoms aresold to you as freedoms. This is what I call "false psycho logy," wheresomething is really imposed on you by the external symbolic social

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network but you tend to identify with it, or internalize it as your own freepsychological choice. (Olson and Worsham 266)

Thus, instead of seeing how we are controlled by capitalism, we buy intothe way that capitalist culture sells us images of our freedom and tries totranslate our lack of freedom into the ideology of free choice. To provethis point, Zi.zekoffers in his JA C interview the example of people beingtold that their loss ofjob security should be affirmed as their new freedomto change jobs whenever they like.

Zizek often refers to this false level of psychological freedom underthe banner of reflexivity. For example, he claims that what really definesour new global economy is the way that all previous traditions and naturalendowments are now considered to be a part of personal choice (267).Thus, through the process of personal reflection, I decide what gender Iwant to be or what ethnic tradition I want to affirm. Here, we can see howMarx's theory of the constantly changing nature of the capitalist subjectis turned on its head; instead of the subject undermining all beliefs andtraditions and thus being confronted with the pure materiality of capitalistrelations, the subject uses these constant transformations to take on newidentities and belief structures. Everything that is solid does melt into theair, but it is also quickly absorbed by the subject's desire to produce andconsume more traditions and beliefs.

In Zitek's theory, the rhetoric of social construction becomes asource for a false sense of personal empowerment and an increasedcirculation of deceptive beliefs and ideologies. According to Zizek'slogic, psychology is a realm of pure deception and must be replaced bya more Cartesian theory of subjectivity. However, we soon find out thatZizek's theory of Cartesian subjectivity is itself based on a Hegelianrereading of psychoanalysis and that this subject of "true radical free­dom" is defined by the empty and universal quality of the subject of theunconscious (267). Here, the subject takes on a totally negative quality asone who can only reject diverse political and social solutions. In fact, inhis interview with Olson and Worsham, Zizek exclaims that he has nopractical political answers. Of course, this answer should not surprise ussince he also states in this interview that "It's not so much to find the readysolutions, but to rej ect the way problems are formulated" (276, 282). Herewe see the logical results of Zizek's desire to base the ethical subject ona purely negative definition: like many academics, Zizek is adept atdescribing problems and shooting down responses, but the question ofspecific concrete solutions rarely surfaces in his writings.

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I believe that one reason why Zizek and other political academicstend to offer only negative arguments is that they are unwilling or unableto confront the hard economic and political realities shaping the produc­tion of knowledge in our culture. More specifically, I will argue that thefailure of academic theorists to deal with concrete academic economicissues forces these writers to make overly general and abstract negativepronouncements regarding culture and society. Furthermore, it is myargument that this tendency to address theoretical social issues, and notconcrete academic problems, motivates many teachers to present knowl­edge to their students in a way that separates symbolic cultural produc­tions from concrete economic and political factors. In other terms, thefailure of academic theorists to connect social and political issues to thestructural problems of their own institutions may infect the way theseteachers present cultural knowledge to their students.

The central paradox of'Zizek's work is that he obsessively talks abouteconomic and political issues in an academic way at the same time thathis work avoids discussing the economics of the profession shaping hisreadership. This paradox should come as no surprise to anyone who haswitnessed the simultaneous politicization of academic culture and thedepoliticization of academic administration. To be more precise, in thelast twenty years we have seen universities and colleges taken over bybottom-line business practices, while we have also watched the dissemi­nation of political and economic criticism into most areas of academicculture. Is this contradiction simply the result of people spending theirenergies critiquing culture and not their own workplaces, or does therealm of cultural criticism act as a safety valve effectively releasing thecritical energies of our intellectuals? To respond to this question concern­ing the relation between academic criticism and the economics of highereducation, I want to concentrate first on Zizek' s writing style and rhetoricas indicative of certain dominant tendencies in academic culture anddiscourse. I then will posit several ways that we can use his theory tochange the structure of higher education in America today.

Reading Zizek's RhetoricIf'Zizek is indeed a writing machine, we can locate a strong tendency forhis mechanical program to repeat itself. This tendency for repetitionconcerns not only the content of his texts but also the structure of his .arguments. In fact, I will posit that the vast majority of his argumentsfollow the same four-part logical structure: he begins by paraphrasing the"common" or "standard" academic understanding of a certain problem;

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he then shows that our understanding of the original problem is wrong andthat Lacanian theory or Hegelian dialectics can provide the true interpre­tation; he next turns to the realm of popular culture and/or everydayexperience to provide proof for his interpretation; and he then returns toa combination of Hegelian philosophy and Lacanian theory to make auniversalizing claim about the original problem. In fact, this final stageof his rhetorical strategy often presents a notion of universal negativityand meaninglessness, which acts to absorb all of the previous stages intoa globalizing and self-negating argument.

Each of these rhetorical stages works to persuade and seduce thereader in different ways and forms. The first step of this process is to setup a "straw man" by producing Zizek's own version of a "common" or"standard" academic interpretation. He thus starts out his rhetoricalprocess by subjecting the reader to a shared symbolic knowledge that hehas constructed himself. He then uses this symbolic and social mode ofacademic bonding to set up the reader for a radical reversal, where thereader's theoretical feet will be pulled from under him or her. This secondrhetorical stage is often signaled by a phrase like "the opposite is actuallythe truth." More often than not, he employs this rhetorical reversal to denythe common sense of the reader and to tum the reader's attention to a"paradoxical" Lacanian and/or Hegelian concept. Furthermore, theseconcepts shaping the second logical time of his argument often involveparadoxical notions like "vanishing mediator," "fundamental antago­nism," "internal Other," and "forced-choice." It is important to note thatall of these notions are counterintuitive in that they combine togetherseemingly opposing concepts and ideas. However, to quote one ofZizek's favorite statements: "This is precisely the point." In order to winover the reader, Zizek must argue that our common sense notions andcultural understandings are misleading because they do not take intoaccount the contradictory nature of social reality itself.

According to Zizek's reading of Lacan and Hegel, the fundamentaldriving force of social reality is the arbitrary imposition of rationalrepresentations. From this perspective, culture is itself mad andcounterintuitive because it is based on the irrational foundations ofreason. In other terms, what allows us to move from a state of irrationalnature to a state of rational culture is the arbitrary imposition of somemaster signifier and discourse (the pure will to power of the master).Here, the irrational mediator has to vanish in order to install a rationalsymbolic order. For example, Freud must posit the presence and thenmurder of the irrational and perverse primal father in order to account for

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the formation of a rational society ofbrothers dedicated to the memory ofthe symbolic father. Likewise, Zizek points to Christianity's need to positthe presence of Christ as the lost mediation between the unknowable godof Jewish culture and the symbolic spirit of Christian culture." In boththese structures, the mediating master (the primal father and Christ) needsto vanish in order to function.

To prove the importance of this second stage of vanishing mediation,Zizek usually turns, in a third rhetorical moment, to the recognizablerealms of everyday experience and popular culture. The power of thisthird move is that it draws in the reader's desire by offering objects ofidentification and common experience. What we then enjoy about hisinterpretations is that they give us a chuckle of recognition, as if we arealso in on a very private joke. However, we must be careful to distinguishour recognition of the example from the conclusions that he draws fromthese examples, for I would argue that he most often uses the reader'ssense of identification to posit self-negating and universalizing conclu­sions. Moreover, the parti cuIarity of the example always resists its inc Ius ioninto the symbolic discourse that Zizek's attempts to subject it to.

As Worsham argues in "On the Discipline and Pleasure of PerilousActs," the use of examples in academic writing can serve many diversepurposes: "We ... use example rather freely and effortlessly in oureveryday speech and in the same way we use it in scholarly argument: toground our thinking, to illustrate or dramatize an idea or viewpoint, tosupply concrete detail, to educate and aid understanding, to make thegiven argument more compelling" (708). In Zizek's case, he claims thathis examples are only the frosting on the cake or a cheap way to seducehis readers (Olson and Worsham 255), but we must question the ways hisuses of examples fit the ideological role of fantasy as he defines it in ThePlague of Fantasies: it structures our desires (7), mediates betweenformal symbolic structures and objects we encounter in reality (7),structures intersubj ecti vity (8), hides soc ial antagonisms (10), representsthe installation of the law (14), and takes a distance to its own content(18). This burdensome and diverse workload associated with fantasy forZizek echoes many of the criteria that Worsham connects to the role ofexamples. In both cases, the object of representation serves to structurea situation or experience by "forgrounding some aspects and minimizingor ignoring others, and thereby telling us in what direction to think"(Consigny qtd. in Worsham, "On" 709). Moreover, like fantasies, ex­amples tend to naturalize social constructions by taking on the feel ofpuremanifestations of reality.

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In academic writing, examples are often taken at face value althoughthey do important ideological work. As John Lyons posits, examples are"the most ideological of figures, in the sense of being the figure that ismost intimately bound to a representation of the world and that mostserves as a veil for the mechanics of that representation" (qtd. inWorsham, "On" 709). Zizek himself presents his theory of fantasy underthe heading of "The Seven Veils of Fantasy" in order to stress the relationbetween fantasy and ideology: for fantasies and examples both revealand conceal a disconnection between symbolic representations andconcrete reality.

In his own work, Zizek's use of examples from popular culture mayact to establish a fantasmatic relationship between his reader and his text;his examples tend to naturalize his symbolic arguments by giving hisabstract universal arguments a concrete feel, which in tum hides theconstructed nature of his arguments. Furthermore, as Worsham posits,there is a certain micropolitcs in academic discourse that tends to placeexamples in a subordinate relation to the general theory or principle thatis being presented (710). In the case of Zizek's work, one often gets theidea that he is only turning to his pop culture references to help supporta larger theoretical claim or universalizing gesture.' The effect of thisprocess is that culture and the (pop) art object are actually devalued at thesame time they are being used to do important ideological work. More­over, his use of recognizable "real life" examples may function to hide thefact that his work is repressing the economics and politics of its ownproduction and consumpti on. In other words, we get real-world examplesin his work, but we do not see how economic and political factors shapethe academic world in which these examples will circulate. For example,how does one read Zizek's discussions ofmulticulturalism differently ifone is an African-American female in a part-time composition positionversus a white male tenured literary theorist? Since, as Worsham argues,examples tend to be decontextualized and placed in new and differentcontexts (711), how do we effectively recontextualize the use of aca­demic examples?

Inside Zizek's MatrixIn order to contextualize Zizek' s rhetoric and his use of examples, I wantto tum to his various readings of the popular film The Matrix. I willconcentrate on "The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversion" because Ibelieve that this Web-based article offers one of the clearest examples ofhis postmodem arguments. Furthermore, this text outlines several of his

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important claims about the postmodem realm of computer technologyand virtual cyberspace.

In typical fashion, Zizek begins his analysis of The Matrix bypresenting his constructed versions of the standard and common aca­demic interpretations of the film:

My Lacanian friends are telling me that the authors must have read Lacan;the Frankfurt School partisans see in the Matrix the extrapolated embodi­ment of Kulturindustrie, the alienated-reified social Substance (of theCapital) directly taking over, colonizing our inner life itself, using us asthe source of energy; New Agers see in the source of speculations on howour world is just a mirage generated by a global Mind embodied in theWorld Wide Web. This series goes back to Plato's Republic: does TheMatrix not repeat exactly Plato's dispositif of the cave (ordinary humansas prisoners, tied firmly to their seats and compelled to watch the shadowyperformance of [what they falsely consider to be] reality?).

The rhetorical strategy of this first stage of Zizek' s argument here is toparaphrase the various common (mis)readings that academics makeconcerning this particular issue, which in this case concerns the questionof the ultimate meaning of this film.

This opening move allows Zizek the chance to gather together manyof his different readers and to show them how they are all wrong, for theessential problem that he reduces all of these different interpretations tois the conflict between Marxism and psychoanalysis as the main ways ofunderstanding virtual reality:

The key opposition is here the one between Frankfurt School and Lacan:should we historicize the Matrix into the metaphor of the Capital thatcolonized culture and subjectivity, or is it the reification of the symbolicorder as such? However, what if this very alternative is false? What if thevirtual character of the symbolic order "as such" is the very condition ofhistoricity?

The ending of this passage introduces the second rhetorical stage, whereZizek will show how the opposition between economic colonization andthe symbolic determination of reality is false, since the very foundationof symbolic culture and history is itself posited to be virtual. Thisrhetorical move thus undermines our common sense understanding ofculture because it breaks down our usual conceptual opposition betweenfiction and reality. In other words, he bases the possibility of history on

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the non-difference between real economic capital and virtual symbolicculture. He thus collapses the Marxist distinction between the materialeconomic base and the cultural superstructure at the same moment hecollapses the Lacanian distinction between the symbolic and the real.

Zizek's argument therefore relies on setting up a conceptual opposi­tion only to knock it down and replace it with a counterintuitive theory ofvirtual reality (VR), which combines opposing ideas together:

The point here is the radical ambiguity of the VR with regard to theproblematic of iconoclasm. On the one hand, VR marks the radicalreduction of the wealth of our sensory experience to-not even letters,but-the minimal digital series of 0 and 1, of passing and non-passing ofthe electrical signal. On the other hand, this very digital machine gener­ates the "simulated" experience of reality which tends to become indis­cernible from the "real" reality, with the consequence of undermining thevery notion of "real" reality- VR is thus at the same time the most radicalassertion of the seductive power of images.

Zizek begins this argument by centering the reader's attention on a single"point," and then he deploys the opposition between digital reduction andsimulated experiences in order to posit the "indiscernible" differencebetween real reality and virtual reality. Moreover, his argument intro­duces a counterintuitive logic by stating that the reduction of experienceto the digital alternation of symbols acts to produce seductive realisticimages. Yet, this assault on our intuition is signaled by his use of the term"radical ambiguity," which sets up the presentation of a contradictorylogic. To be more precise: the fake virtual world seems more real becausewe are fundamentally living in an ambiguous reality that does notdistinguish between the virtual and the real.

To further prove this contradictory and ambiguous point, Zizek thenjumps to the realm of popular culture. In this third rhetorical stage, weslide between common experiences and examples drawn from sciencefiction films as if there is already no difference between the virtual realmof film and the real realm of lived experience:

Is not the ultimate American paranoiac fantasy that of an individual livingin a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenlystarts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged toconvince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him areeffectively actors and extras in a gigantic show? The most recent exampleof this is Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), with JimCarreyplaying

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the small town clerk who gradually discovers the truth that he is the heroof a 24-hours permanent TV show: his hometown is constructed on agigantic studio set, with cameras following him permanently.

The rhetorical strategy in this passage begins with defining the "ultimate" J100

example of the previous argument by introducing proof based on thepersonal and cultural experience of fantasy. In many ways, the psycho­logical realm of fantasy represents our everyday virtual reality wherepersonal experience is interwoven with cultural representations. Fantasyis thus the embodiment of the ambiguous virtual reality that Zizekestablishes in the second stage of his argument. Furthermore, in hiscultural example of The Truman Show, he attempts to prove somethingabout the virtual reality of one film by turning to another film, andtherefore he participates in a postmodern hall of mirrors where one mediasimulation is judged for its verisimilitude by comparing it to anothermedia simulation.

Zizek uses this cultural example to introduce the fourth stage of hisargument by shifting from the "concrete" realm of particular examples tothe abstract realm of generalized global statements:

The underlying experience of Time Out of Joint and of The Truman Showis that the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in its veryhyper-reality, in a way irreal, substanceless, deprived of the materialinertia. So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real lifedeprived of the weight and inertia of materiality-in the late capitalistconsumerist society, "real social life" itself somehow acquires the fea­tures of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in "real" life as stageactors and extras.... The ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian de­spiritualized universe is the de-materialization of the "real life" itself, itsreversal into a spectral show.

Here, the "ultimate" truth is declared to be that our late capitalistconsumerist culture is a dematerialized and de-spiritualized staged spec­tral show. In other words, nothing is real-not even the real.

Zizek's final interpretation therefore results in an affirmation of totalHegelian negativity. Everything is considered fake because the real andthe symbolic have been equated in a universal claim of absolute self­negation. Doesn't this mean that all of the previous findings concerningvirtual reality, radical ambiguity, and capitalist culture are transcendedand rendered insignificant in the face of an all-consuming rhetoric ofdenial?" Ibelieve that this dual attempt to produce cultural and theoretical

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distinctions only to collapse them into a self-consuming rhetoric is one ofthe fundamental gestures in postmodem academic discourse. In otherwords, Zizek's reading of The Matrix only uses culture and theory as apretext to perform an academic act of self-denial. Since everything is fakeand nothing is grounded in reality, his own arguments must be consideredto be fake and unrealistic.

The Social Other is LackingYet, Zizek continues to write, and in this very essay he follows hisestablishment of absolute self-negation by restarting his nihilistic ma­chine to take on another series of common understandings. In thefollowing section, entitled "The 'Really Existing' Big Other,"hisrhetori­cal strategy is re-centered on the question of social control:

What, then, is the Matrix? Simply the Lacanian "big Other," the virtualsymbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. This dimensionof the "big Other" is that of the constitutive alienation of the subject in thesymbolic order: the big Other pulls the strings, the subject doesn't speak,he "is spoken" by the symbolic structure. In short, this "big Other" is thename for the social Substance, for all that on account of which the subjectnever fully dominates the effects of his acts, i.e. on account of which thefinal outcome of his activity is always something else with regard to whathe aimed at or anticipated.

In this first rhetorical stage, he establishes the common academic under­standing of social determinism: we are controlled by social forcesbeyond our understanding and power. Here, the matrix is not consid­ered to be based on the new invention of virtual reality machines;rather, this type of virtual control is equated with the very fact of ourbeing social subjects who are born into a world of predeterminedsymbolic codes.

Zitek follows this restatement of Lacan' s theory of symbolic alien­ation by offering a "however," which sets into a motion another dialec­tical reversal:

However, it is here crucial to note that, in the key chapters of Seminar XI,Lacan struggles to delineate the operation that follows alienation and isin a sense its counterpoint, that of separation: alienation IN the big Otheris followed by the separation FROM the big Other. Separation takes placewhen the subject takes note of how the big Other is in itself inconsistent,purely virtual, "barred," deprived of the Thing.

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Once again, the counterintuitive argument is developed in this secondrhetorical moment where the symbolic order is itself determined to beinconsistent, virtual, barred, and deprived. That is, the thing that controlsus is itselflacking in control, and thus the symbolic Other or order is itselfrendered virtual.

Zizek follows this theory of the lacking Other with his return tofantasy and the exemplary logic of popular culture:

Fantasy is an attempt to fill out this lack of the Other, not of the subject,i.e. to (re)constitute the consistency of the big Other. For that reason,fantasy and paranoia are inherently linked: paranoia is at its mostelementary a belief into an "Other of the Other," into another Other who,hidden behind the Other of the explicit social texture, programs (whatappears to us as) the unforeseen effects of social life and thusguarantees its consistency: beneath the chaos of market, the degrada­tion of mora Is, etc., there is the purposeful strategy of the Jewish plot.... This paranoiac stance acquired a further boost with today'sdigitalization of our daily lives: when our entire (social) existence isprogressively externalized-materialized in the big Other of the com­puter network, it is easy to imagine an evil programmer erasing our digitalidentity and thus depriving us of our social existence, turning us into non­persons.

Here he makes an important insight by arguing that fantasy does not fulfillthe subject's own sense of lack, but rather it helps to plug the hole in thesymbolic Other. In many ways, we can say that Zizek's own tum topopular culture for particular examples serves this fantasmatic functionof trying to fill the gaps in the lacking symbolic order. Moreover, hishabitual example of the "Jewish plot" appears to come out of nowhere,and it forces us to question what role his repetitive discussion of anti­Semitism plays in his work. Does this tum to examples of anti-Semitismand other states of cultural victimization represent his own academicfantasy? And if this is true, does he use these examples to make thesymbolic Other seem more complete and full? Zizek does effectivelyjuxtapose these fantasies ofvictimization with discussions of "our own"alienated status in a digital symbolic universe that reduces us to being"non-persons." I would like to posit that the flipside of his self-negatingrhetoric is a fantasmatic academic objectification of victimized others. Inthis structure, the objectification of the other's victimization points to thedisplaced aggression that often circulates in postmodem culture and isvery evident in academic criticism.

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The reason why academics may need to return constantly to scenesof cultural victimization is that these scenes of torture give a real presenceto the theoretical claims concerning symbolic alienation and subjectivedestitution. In fact, in a fourth logical moment, Zizek returns to theultimate point of The Matrix in order to claim that the film fails to go farenough and show how behind our virtual reality, there is nothing but ahole of nothingness:

The film is not wrong in insisting that there IS a Real beneath the VirtualReality simulation-as Morpheus puts to Neo when he shows him theruined Chicago landscape: "Welcome to the desert of the real." However,the Real is not the "true reality" behind the virtual simulation, but the voidwhich makes reality incomplete/inconsistent, and the function of everysymbolic Matrix is to conceal this inconsistency-one of the ways toeffectuate this concealment is precisely to claim that, behind the incom­plete/inconsistent reality we know, there is another reality with nodeadlock of impossibility structuring it.

By defining the Real to be a void, Zizek creates a theoretical black holewhere all of his and Lacan's theoretical concepts and distinctions aresucked into a state of total negativity. Like many other postmodemacademic writers, he thus presents some very important and criticalnotions and examples only to ultimately deprive them of any groundingother than their own self-denial. Isn't this type of self-consuming rhetoricproof of the way postmodem society has helped to place intellectuals ina structure where they deny the reality and the import of their owncriticisms? No wonder so many academic arguments remain fixated onthe level of pure theory.

The Academic FantasyI believe that one of the reasons why Zizek is able to be so rhetoricallyseductive in his writings is that he appeals to the fantasy of so manyacademics who would also like to be global intellectual free agentscirculating around the educational world without having to be tied downby the material exigencies of teaching and committee work. From acertain perspective, we can say that he mimics the flight of globalcapital as it circulates through diverse symbolic systems and over­comes all national boundaries and traditional value systems. As is thecase with the World Wide Web, he is able to spread out and proliferateby freeing himself from any hard real material reality. Yet, like theWeb, he is read and received in various institutional and cultural

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domains that are still tied to the material reality he tends to deny.The problem with Zizek's discourse is thus also the problem with

cyberspace and academic culture: all of these rhetorical domains tend todeny the very material conditions they are dependent on. For example,while Zizek' s main audience is surely western academics, he never seemsto mention the politics and economics of higher education. Matters likethe downsizing of tenure, the exploitation of part-time labor, the rise ofthe administrative class, and the unemployment of people with PhDsrarely enter into his intense debate with academic culture. Perhaps, thisdenial of the economic and political realities shaping the production andconsumption of symbolic academic culture helps to free him and otherpostmodem intellectuals from dealing with the real material factorsweighing down our symbolic discourses. And without these materialanchors in the real, Zizek is able to circulate his symbolic knowledge ina boundary less symbolic virtual hyper-real that ultimately points to itsown meaninglessness and vacuity.

I Write, but I do not ExistThis proliferation of self-consuming rhetoric is continued in the nextsection of the text, which is entitled "The big Other doesn't Exist." In thisargument, we find Zizek jumpmg between his theoretical denial of boththe subj ect and the Other. He starts this movement by first returning to thesocial realm of common sense:

"Big Other" also stands for the field of common sense at which one canarrive after free deliberation; philosophically, its last great version isHabermas's communicative community with its regulative ideal of agree­ment. And it is this "big Other" that progressively disintegrates today.What we have today is a certain radical split: on the one hand, theobjectivized language of experts and scientists which can no longer betranslated into the common language accessible to everyone, but ispresent in it in the mode of fetishized formulas that no one reallyunderstands, but which shape our artistic and popular imaginary (BlackHole, Big Bang, Superstrings, Quantum Oscillation ... ). Not only innatural sciences, but also in economy and other social sciences, the expertjargon is presented as an objective insight with which one cannot reallyargue, and which is simultaneously untranslatable into our commonexperience. In short, the gap between scientific insight and commonsense is unbridgeable, and it is this very gap which elevates scientists intothe popular cult-figures of the "subjects supposed to know" (the StephenHawking phenomenon). The strict obverse of this objectivity is the way

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in which, in the cultural matters, we are confronted with the multitude oflife-styles which one cannot translate into each other: all we can do issecure the conditions for their tolerant coexistence in a multiculturalsociety.

Zizek's main point here appears to be structured by the cultural opposi­tion between untranslatable expert scientific knowledge and themulticultural combination of diverse lifestyles. From a certain perspec­tive, one could argue that both of these current social tendencies contrib­ute to a feeling of losing any notion of "common sense" or shared culturalvalues.

Moreover, Zitek seems to be right when 'he posits that computertechnology constantly reminds us of this level of cultural fragmentationby bombarding us with diverse and contradictory social messages derivedfrom diverse and contradictory cultures and local identities. However, heveers off course when he tries to collapse this opposition between scienceand cultural identity by affirming that the real problem is the generalignorance of the masses:

And the point is not simply that the real issues are blurred because scienceis corrupted through financial dependence on large corporations and stateagencies-even in themselves, sciences cannot provide the answer.Ecologists predicted 15 years ago the death of our forests-the problemis now a too large increase of wood .... Where this theory of risk societyis too short is in emphasizing the irrational predicament into which thisputs us, common subjects: we are again and again compelled to decide,although we are well aware that we are in no position to decide, that ourdecision will be arbitrary. Ulrich Beck and his followers refer here to thedemocratic discussion of all options and consensus-building; however,this does not resolve the immobilizing dilemma: why should the demo­cratic discussion in which the majority participates lead to better result,when, cognitively, the ignorance of the majority remains.

It is telling that in this passage he mentions and then denies the economiccontrol of science only to concentrate on the ignorance of the masses. Butisn't the stupefaction of the general public derived in part by the culturaldesire to hide the true economic determination of our symbolic systems?Moreover, he fails to mention that the political order is itself oftencontrolled by money and pure capitalistic calculations. He thus turns tothe social and the political only to void these symbolic orders of their realmaterial weight.

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In response, to this voiding of the symbolic order of its materiality andconsistency, Zizek returns to the realm of fantasy and paranoid con­spiracy theories to clog the hole left by the emptying out of meaning andvalue from the symbolic order: "The political frustration of the majorityis thus understandable: they are called to decide, while, at the same time,receiving the message that they are in no position effectively to decide,i.e. to objectively weigh the pros and cons. The recourse to 'conspiracytheories' is a desperate way out of this deadlock, an attempt to regain aminimum of what Fred Jameson calls 'cognitive mapping. '" In this thirdrhetorical movement, his description of conspiracy theories can be itselfread as a conspiracy theory, allowing him to substitute the lack ofmateriality with an imaginary fantasy object, for he fails to mention thatthe reason why people cannot obj ectively weigh the pros and cons of thesocial and scientific messages they are receiving is that these messagesare not objective, since they are all tainted by the subj ective political andeconomic forces that are constantly being repressed.

After he then establishes this popular example of conspiracy theories,he enters his fourth rhetorical stage by making a more general anduniversalizing claim: "The problem is not that ufologists and conspiracytheorists regress to a paranoiac attitude unable to accept (social) reality;the problem is that this reality itself is becoming paranoiac." In responseto this statement, we should ask how it is possible that reality itself cantake on the psychological and subjective attributes of being paranoid.Isn't paranoia precisely based on the subj ect' s radical rej ection of socialreality? How can he then invert this concept and call the social order itselfparanoid?

In this inversion, we find a key to understanding Zizek's centralrhetorical and theoretical mistake: since he denies the materiality andrealness of social reality, he is able to equate reality itself with a psychoticstate of self-negation. Here, the subjective and the obj ective are identifiedin a Hegelian moment where both are equivalent because neither has anymeaning or content. Furthermore, he himself tries to anticipate thisproblem by projecting it back onto the field of contemporary culture:"One is tempted to claim, in the Kantian mode, that the mistake of theconspiracy theory is somehow homologous to the 'paralogism of the purereason,' to the confusion between the two levels: the suspicion (of thereceived scientific, social, etc. common sense) as the formal method­ological stance, and the positivation of this suspicion in another all­explaining global para-theory." Doesn't Zitek's own argument con­stantly return to this level of an "all-explaining global para-theory"?

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It is thus highly paradoxical that Zizek' s obsessive return to the realmof the real only serves to transform the real into a symbolic form emptyof all content." His universalizing and globalizing discourse thus feeds offof his ability to make us think that he is talking about social reality andthe existential real at the same time that he absorbs both of these ordersinto a state of unconscious non-meaning. This assault on the real contin­ues in the next section of his text, which begins with another possibleinterpretation of what the matrix is really about: "From another stand­point, the Matrix also functions as the' screen" that separates us from theReal, that makes the 'desert of the real' bearable." Here, the real appearsto be equivalent to the Lacanian notion of the imaginary as the ideal andidealizing mental space, which allows the subject the ability to escapefrom symbolic contradictions and real trauma. In this tum of the interpre­tive screw, we see that the matrix is not just a social fiction or thecontrolling symbolic order; rather, this virtual reality is shown to have animportant psychological and ideological function.

After he establishes this imaginary nature of the virtual matrix, Zizekintroduces his second rhetorical stage by insisting on the "radical ambi­guity" of this real imaginary screen: "However, it is here that we shouldnot forget the radical ambiguity of the Lacanian Real: it is not the ultimatereferent to be covered/ gentrified/ domesticated by the screen of fantasy­the Real is also and primarily the screen itself as the obstacle that always­already distorts our perception of the referent, of the reality out there." Ina very paradoxical statement, he here affirms that the real is both theultimate referent shielded by the screen and the very fact of the screenitself. In fact, on closer inspection, he does state that the real is not theultimate referent, but he continues by writing as ifit is still the center ofreference. The ambiguity in his theory is thus matched by the ambiguityof his language, and this represents one of the symptomatic aspects of hiswriting style, for we can read this passage as indicating that his attemptto repress the real as the ultimate referent fails, and so the real returns ina repressed form. His writing symptom is therefore a paradoxical signi­fier, which conceals and reveals a repressed real referent.

I have been arguing that this repressed real referent in Zizek' s text isthe economic and political factors determining the production and circu­lation of symbolic academic knowledge. Since he continues to miss hisencounter with this real materiality, his text tends to return symptomati­cally to the same paradoxical contradictions. Like Neo, the main charac­ter of TheMatrix, Zizck knows that something is wrong-he has a splinterin his mind-but the only way he can address the problem is by going

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further away from it deep into his own virtual void. Academic theory thusserves him the ideological space to escape the real material conditionsthat shape the discourse of the university."

From Universal Theory to the Contingent WorkerIn order to redeem important aspects of'Zizek's theoretical work, it maybe necessary to reverse his rhetorical structure and begin with a critiqueof his final affirmation of universal negativity. To clarify this strategy, Iwill translate the four stages of his rhetorical machine into four mainaspects of contemporary university economics and politics: administra­tion, curriculum, student consumers, and standardized education. Ac­cording to my reading of the postmodem university, debates over curricu­lum and culture (the first stage of'Zizek' s rhetorical structure) have oftenhidden the real source ofpower and conflict in our institutions of highereducation: the new administrative class. This foundational source ofpower and economic control functions like Zizek's vanishing mediator(his second logical stage): a traumatic social antagonism covered byimaginary fantasies and ideological constructions (his third stage). Themain way that fantasy and ideology function to hide the basic conflictbetween education and capitalism is by producing happy or contentstudents who do not complain about the universalizing standardization(the fourth stage) of their higher education. This ideological satisfactionof the psychological subject is also evident in the academic fantasy of thepure theorist who is not involved in the concrete economic and politicalforces shaping higher education.

In many ways, the globalizing success of universities has allowedthem to grow beyond their own educational capacities so that they havebecome increasingly like large factories of knowledge consumption andbureaucratic regulation. Moreover, this standardizing movement in highereducation is a prime example of the universal negativity that Zizek oftendescribes in the last stage of his rhetorical machine. Universities haveindeed become universalizing by emptying the essential content fromtheir educational missions. For example, in most of the large universitiesin our country, students are often packed into lecture halls containingmore than five hundred students. While this is an effective way foruniversities to save money, by using one professor or graduate student toteach many students, one has to wonder about the quality of education thatcan be presented in an environment effectively ruling out the students'participation. Moreover, the size of these classes often forces the instruc­tor to give only multiple-choice exams testing the students' ability to

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internalize and spit out information and factoids. Is this really education,or is this a way to allow people to feel that business is going on as usualalthough the system has outgrown its own function?

In many ways, we can read the field of composition as the centralsymptom of this postmodem university system, for the symptomaticnature of writing instruction is manifested by the notion that anyone canteach writing because it has no inherent subject matter. Moreover, as ageneral requirement, writing courses are supposed to be universal andempty (void of content), and therefore they embody Zitek's negativedefinition of the postmodem global subject. In other words, Zizek'sdepiction of the universalizing nothingness of the virtual global economyis manifested by the creation of a field (composition) that staffs requiredcourses that are supposed to have no inherent content and that aresupposed to be taught by people with no particular skills or intellectualtraining. Here, we see how writing instruction has become a symptom ofthe general de-skilling and de-professionalization of the causualizedworkforce in the global economy. Thus, theories like Zizek's help us tounderstand these universal forces shaping our globalized virtual worlds;however, these theories must be forced to account for the labor practicesshaping their own production and consumption.

In order to combat this universal emptying out of difference in thefield of writing, we need a national movement that would defend theparticular cultural knowledge, experience, expertise, and degrees defin­ing the professional status of compositionists. This effort has to benational, or even intema tional, since it is the nati onal academi c labor poo Ithat helps university administrators to replace tenure-track faculty posi­tions with non-tenurable positions. However, we must not let this global­izing nature of our capitalist system blind us from seeing the possibleways that local coalitions can work together to respond to local-globalconcerns. Perhaps what is missing in Zitek's and other cultural critics'work is an articulation of a social movement that understands both thelocal and global aspects of economic determinism, for Zizeks abstractand universalizing rhetoric tends to blind us from seeing the contingentnature of political coalitions. Moreover, his fixation on generalizingabout the traumatic nature of political and economic power structuresprevents him from defining the micropolitics of local and national socialmovements.

A national movement defending the professional status ofcompositionists would have to counteract the fact that the growinginterest in political and economic theory in the university has most often

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been coupled with the growing exploitation of educational workers. I amnot arguing here that we should get rid of theory and theorists; rather, weshould stop using theory as a virtual way of escaping our own realpractices. The best way to limit this self-negating postmodem rhetoric, arhetoric that is so evident in Zizek's work, is to insist on grounding oursymbolic knowledge systems on an understanding of the concrete mate­rial factors shaping current employment practices. To transform the fieldof composition into one of the intellectual centers of the new university,we need to tie theory to our own material practices and contingent socialmovements.

University of CaliforniaLos Angeles, California

Notes

1.While many other academic theorists also discuss economic and politicalissues while avoiding the concrete material conditions shaping higher educa­tion, I believe Zizek is an extreme example, since so much of his work concernsa radical critique of contemporary capitalism and postmodem culture.

2. To clarify what I mean by his self-consuming rhetoric, I want to turnquickly to Zizek's Hegelian use of Lacanian theory. He often turns to Lacan'stheoretical distinctions only to erase their differences by making abstract andnegative universalizing claims. An early example of this rhetorical process canbe found in Looking Awry: "Lacan's point is that the real purpose of the driveis not its goal (full satisfaction) but its aim: the drive's ultimate aim is simply toreproduce itself as drive, to return to its circular path, to continue its path to andfrom the goal. The real source of enjoyment is the repetitive movement of theclosed circuit" (5). At first glance, this argument seems to follow Lacan'stheories of the drive and repetition, and yet doesn't Lacan make a majordistinction between the drive, as a structure of difference, and repetition, as thereturn of the same? Moreover, Lacan posits that the drive moves around theobject (a), and thus it is structured by the loss and not the production ofenjoyment. I posit that this collapse between the drive, the object a, andrepetition points to Zizek's own symptomatic repetition of signifiers that havebeen voided of signification. Throughout his work, one of Zizek's strategies isto show how everyone of Lacan's concepts should be read from the perspectiveof the real and at the same time, he transforms the real into the symbolic. Hepresents a chain of equivalencies, which we can read as: repetition = superego= idiotic enjoyment = fantasy = the signifier = Ie sinthome = the letter =enjoyment-in-meaning = the object (a) = a fragment of the real. In other terms,he reduces Lacan' s entire conceptual edifice into the mechanical reproductionof the same idea: the superego represents the pure repetition of an idiotic modeof enjoyment.

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What this theory does not allow for is the distinctions that Lacan makesbetween real enjoyment, imaginary fantasy, the repetition of the signifier, thesymbolic structure of the superego, and the presence of lost enjoyment in theform of the object (a). Zizek thus participates in the postmodem process thatJean Baudrillard attaches to the emptying out of all essences from every system.Of course, Zizek would have a hard time himself arguing with this analysis sincehe claims in The Sublime Object of Ideology that his own method serves to getrid of the "fascination" with the "kernel of signification" and replace the searchfor hidden meaning with a purely formal definition of the subject (14). In thissense, it is not surprising that he empties Lacan's concepts of all meaning; yet,what we must pay attention to is what he excludes and how he produces thisseries of conceptual displacements. Moreover, it is important to question the roleplayed by this type of universalizing mechanical rhetoric in the contemporaryacademic writing.

3. I am using the term "modernist" here to designate the culture of scientificand technological rationality first developed during the Enlightenment. Forvarious ways of defining the relation between modernist culture and the writingprocess, see Worsham, "Rhetoric," 398-99.

4. This conflict between economic globalization and cultural diversifica­tion is complicated in Zizek's work by his concern with ethnic fundamentalismand psychological individualism. In fact, I would argue that the vast majority ofZizek's work deals with the interaction among these four central forces ofcontemporary society: economic globalism, liberal multiculturalism, ethnicfundamentalism, and psychological individualism. I would also argue that thefield of composition theory is currently structured by the interaction amongfundamentalism (current-traditional rhetoric), individualism (expressivism),multiculturalism (socio-epistemic rhetoric), and globalism (cognitivism).

5. For a detailed discussion of the concept of global capitalism in Zizek'swork, see McLaren 615-17.

6. Zizek develops this reading of Jesus as a vanishing mediator in Fragile,157-58.

7. Miklitsch argues that Zizek often employs an overly general and negativerhetoric when he discussing art and other modes of culture (611).

8. Gigante points to the universal negativity of Zizek' s philosophicalstatements:

In the case of oiftek, the critical subject never quite does emerge, butremains trapped in an endless cycle of birth contractions (and expan­sions) which expose the Real of the struggle involved in any act of self­assertion. Like others, such as his mentor Jacques Lacan, he assumes atheoretical stance which sets out to transgress boundaries betweenphilosophy, psychology, literature, politics, film, and popular culture.But where oiftek is unique, and where he makes his radical break withother literary theorists who take up a position, any position at all that

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pretends to some notional content or critical truth, is in the fact that hefundamentally has no position. (153)

In this insightful analysis of'Zizek's work, Gigante continues by connectingZizek's lack of a fundamental position to the emptiness of his critical self: "Inorder to understand how 'the 'void' functions at the heart of'Zizek's critical self,giving rise to and at the same time undermining each theoretical structure heerects (always with borrowed tools) it will be useful to examine how he adaptsthis model from Schelling" (154).

9. Hurley argues that Zizek's abstract and privatizing discourse often worksto transform the real materiality of capitalist relations into an immaterial realmof virtual subjectivity (8).

10. In his seminar L 'envers de la psychanalyse (The Inverse of Psycho­analysis), Lacan posits that we now live in a period dominated by the discourseof the university. For Lacan, this discourse is not only dominated by thecirculation of symbolic knowledge, universalizing bureaucratic structures, andsubjective objectification, but it is also a structure supported by the hiddenmaster of the signifier. On one level, this means that the key to our postmodemuniverse is the way we subject all experiences to the symbolic reign of language.However, Lacan also posits that it is the ego in the form of the master signifier"I," which is the hidden truth of the universal university discourse.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena.Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1993.

Gigante, Denise. "Toward a Notion of Critical Self-Creation: Slavoj Zizek andthe 'Vortex of Madness.'" New Literary History 29 (1998): 153-68.

Hurley, James S. "Real Virtuality: Slavoj Zizek and 'Post-Ideological' Ideol­ogy." Postmodern Culture 9.1 (1998). http://muse.jhu.edu/journalspostmodern _culture/v009/9.1r _hurley.html (25 June 2002).

Lacan, Jacques. L'envers de lapsychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1991.

Marx, Karl, and Frederich Engels. Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition.1848. London: Verso, 1998.

McLaren, Peter. "Slavoj Ziiek's Naked Politics: Opting for the Impossible, ASecondary Elaboration." JAC 21 (2001): 613-47.

Miklitsch, Robert. "Passing on Popular Culture: 'Art for Lacan's Sake. '" JAC21 (2001): 605-12.

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Olson, Gary A., and Lynn Worsham. "Slavoj Zizek: Philosopher, CulturalCritic, and Cyber-Communist" JAC 21 (2001): 251-86.

Worsham, Lynn. "On the Discipline and Pleasure of Perilous Acts." JAC 19(1999): 707-21.

--. "On the Rhetoric of Theory in the Discipline of Writing: A Comment anda Proposal." JAC 19 (1999): 389-409.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy WorthFighting for? London: Verso, 2000.

--. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through PopularCulture. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991.

--."The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversion." http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199912/msgOOOI9.html (25 June 2002).

--. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.

--. "Repeating Lenin." lacan.com. http://www.lacan.comlreplenin.htm (25June 2002).

--. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

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